News

At the recent WWDC 2018, Apple announced that the Mac operating system is getting one hell of a facelift, including a new name for the latest version: macOS Mojave. Unsurprisingly, Apple ditched its mountain – themed names (high sierra) and moved on to desserts. Read more

This year’s WWDC keynote presentation was essentially a big software show. While iOS 12 and macOS 10.14, hogged most of the limelight, updates for watchOS, tvOS were also on deck. The upgrades for Apple watch and Apple TV operating systems centred around tweaking the existing features and adding a few new ones. Read more

The Apple World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) 2018 keynote is hours away, and as the name suggests, the annual conference will shed light on all things software for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Apple TV. Read more

We are less than a week away from the release of iOS 12 at WWDC but Apple isn’t done with iOS 11 just yet. The much awaited iOS 11.4 update has been released to the public and it brings two big new features – Messages in the Cloud and AirPlay 2. There’s a bunch of other small additions and bug fixes as well.Read more

The worldwide PC shipments were totalled at around 61.7 million in the first quarter of 2018, as reported by Gartner. According to the report, this was a 1.4 % decline from the first quarter of 2017. The PC market is facing a 14th consecutive decline from the second quarter of 2012. And while most PC manufacturers are facing disappointing sales, Apple’s Mac and MacBook sales are pretty steady compared to the same quarter a year ago.Read more

If you’re suddenly not able to switch on your Apple Watch 2, don’t worry, because you might just get a free fix. Apple is now offering free repairs for 42mm Apple Watch Series 2 in case they either won’t power on or have a swollen battery, including those that have their display popped loose due to the swollen battery.Read more

If you think that the iPhone X is expensive, wait till you see the price tag of this year’s iPhone. When Apple launched its flagship iPhone X priced at around $1000, it raised an inevitable question: Is it worth the money? While the iPhone X is not selling as well as expected, popular thought is that the technology used in the iPhone X will reduce in price eventually, like everything else, and that will enable Apple to give its customers a slightly less pricey device.Read more

Although the HomePod has only been on sale for a little while, the sales have fallen well below expectation. Ming-Chi Kuo of KGI Securities claims that Apple is considering making a low-cost version of the HomePod to give the sales a much-needed boost. Kuo also predicted that while the market expects Apple to sell around 5 to 10 million HomePods, the number will probably be closer to 2 to 2.5 million, which is, well, disappointing to say the least.

An affordable and smaller HomePod could help increase sales in the short term. HomePod, according to Apple, is a powerful speaker and an intelligent home assistant adept at handling everyday tasks. So, Apple could possibly remove the Siri component and add a battery to make a portable version of the HomePod.

The reviews collectively agreed that the speaker is indeed incredibly impressive for the size and money, but is hardly the smartest one on the market. Amazon’s Echo and Google’s Home Speaker are significantly more capable when it comes to providing solutions and undertaking tasks.

This is probably because of the fact that Apple controls the personal data available to both itself and to any third party developer in contrast to Amazon’s Alexa. Alexa opens us to any third party developer, while Google’s Assistant has gobbled up as much data as possible to make it smart and capable.

Apple follows a very stringent privacy policy, which starts by saying that Apple believes that privacy should be a fundamental right. So, we’re very glad that at least there’s one company that is sitting on the extreme privacy end.

A survey result showed that privacy wasn’t so high on the radar for an average customer during the HomePod launch. To them, the most visible issue was that their HomePod was dumber than its rivals. However, the increased publicity around the privacy controversies is changing that viewpoint.

Apple’s HomePod retails for $349 (approx Rs. 23206) and is more expensive than Amazon and Google devices. Even though Apple markets the HomePods as a high-end speaker rather than a speaker with a digital assistant built in, the competitor companies offer cheaper devices.

The cheaper version of the HomePod will compete directly with these devices. Apple currently offers cheaper versions of its iPhones and iPad, the iPhone SE costs $349 (approx Rs. 23206), and the entry-level iPad retails for $329 (approx Rs. 21800) . These devices have been pretty popular for Apple.

Thus, we suspect that the cheaper version of the HomePod will still focus on the audio quality. Therefore, we can expect the device to be more expensive than the Google and Amazon devices, but cheaper than the current version of itself.